by Susan Conant
By the time I began to work Rowdy, the sky had turned such a deep charcoal that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a flurry of cinders mixed with snow. I pulled some white work gloves from my pockets, put on a pair, and used three more for the directed retrieve. In the ring, you have the dog retrieve one of three gloves, whichever one the judge designates. Getting the correct glove is the kind of task that malamutes learn almost effortlessly. Where they fall to pieces is on such challenging exercises as walking by your side. Didn’t Einstein flunk algebra? After Rowdy had joyfully brought back the gloves a few times, I had him retrieve a metal dumbbell from an old set of scent discrimination articles. Even golden retrievers aren’t naturally wild about the taste and feel of metal. Rowdy had already learned to take and hold metal objects, but he certainly hadn’t learned to like them. I had him bring back the metal dumbbell only once, and when I took it from him, I rubbed his shoulders, told him that he was the greatest obedience dog in the history of the Alaskan malamute, and gave him a hunk of Vermont cheddar.
Finally, the dogs did the group exercises, the long sit and the long down. Afterward, while Rowdy was slavering at the sight of Kimi’s “I’ve still got mine, but you haven’t” routine with her dog biscuit, I worked on my article about the Chinese crested, then finished wrapping my last two presents, a distinctive gray-and-white natural fiber scarf for my father and a very long box containing a set of PVC jumps and hurdles for Steve and India. As I was curling the last loose end of ribbon, Geri Driscoll finally called. When she asked to speak to my big boy, I thought she meant Rowdy, but once I realized that she’d never seen him, I convinced her that Steve was unavailable and persuaded her to leave a message. It was short.
“Tell him I didn’t find a thing,” she said. “Not a thing.” She sounded disappointed, mostly, I suspected, because she’d had to settle for talking to a nonperson.
“So,” I told the dogs when I’d hung up, “if you’re so smart, tell me whose it was? Whose body?”
I said the same thing to Steve as soon as he called. “So which was it? It had to be Oscar’s, right? Because that’s the one he absolutely had to get rid of. Mattie’s I guess he just dumped in the woods somewhere, because if some hiker comes across a body or a skeleton or whatever, and it turns out to be human? Jesus, every forensic pathologist in the state of New Hampshire probably comes running, and before long, your corpse gets identified. And then someone figures out that he didn’t just die; he’s been put to sleep. If that’s how Miner did it. But if some hiker finds a dead dog?”
“Yeah. The average hiker’s going to make a wide detour, and that’s it. Except you’d think that while they were searching for Patterson … But maybe not.”
“Steve, is Miner around? Upstairs? Have you seen him?”
“Not yet, but he’s got to be around Cambridge somewhere. Willie’s here.”
“Upstairs?”
“Down here.”
“Well, I hope he’s behind wire mesh,” I said.
Steve laughed. “The worst he does is nip. It isn’t even a nip. It’s a little pinch. I like him. He’s a spunky little guy.”
“Apparently Miner does, too. Most husbands whose wives have dogs like that would’ve … I mean, as long as he was at it anyway …” It’s the part of the job that every good vet hates most. I changed the subject. “So how’s your emergency?”
“False alarm,” he said. “They thought something’d got stuck in the dog’s throat, and it turned out they were right. Needle from the Christmas tree. Scotch pine.”
“But you …?”
“The dog’s a real big mixed breed, and he’s an easy ten pounds overweight. He’s a real chow hound, and they’re nice people, but they’re not too careful. So when I heard he was retching … Like I told you, you always have to rule out G.D.V.”
“Steve, at the Bourques’?” I said. “Jesus, there are pines all around the house. It’s called Pine Tree Kennels, for God’s sake, and their other businesses are all Pine Tree, too. Jesus, maybe that’s all that was wrong with Mattie.”
“That’ll do it. Any small object, if it’s in the back of the throat, if it’s near the pharynx or the larynx. Then you’ll get retching but no vomiting. But—”
“And Mattie wouldn’t have looked all that sick.” I was thinking out loud. “There wouldn’t have been anything else wrong with her. Anneliese said that Cliff said that, that Mattie didn’t look all that sick. And even Anneliese wasn’t positive that her abdomen was swollen. And she was sure that Mattie hadn’t got into a bag of food or anything. Jesus. So Cliff was right again, Steve.”
“We don’t know that. And that’s a real dangerous assumption for an owner to make.”
“But just in theory … Look, suppose that’s what it was, okay? Mattie gets a pine needle stuck in her throat, she starts gagging, and Cliff takes her in so Lee can examine her. Cliff leaves. And Patterson walks in. He knows exactly what you’ve been saying, okay? You have to assume it’s bloat. But even so, he walks in and finds Miner there in the middle of the night, and the big emergency turns out to be a pine needle?”
“Any veterinarian—”
“Yes, but the people who live around there aren’t veterinarians. What do they know? You didn’t laugh at that story about the manure pile—basically, you thought it was Miner’s fault and sort of an occupational hazard—but they thought it was hilarious. Probably they wouldn’t have thought this was quite that funny, but I’ll bet they’d have found it sort of funny, especially if Patterson embellished the story a little.”
“It’s possible,” Steve said. “But it’s the scenario we already worked out.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “Not really. It’s still possible that Miner muzzled her. But there’s one big difference.”
“If her problem was a pine needle at the back of her throat,” Steve said, “she didn’t die of G.D.V. syndrome.”
“And if she didn’t,” I said, “then Miner wasn’t left with two bodies after all.”
22
Obedience competition involves only two group exercises, the long sit and the long down. In the midafternoon of the day before Christmas, I introduced Rowdy and Kimi to a third: the long shot. Instead of tossing my duffel bags of clothes, kibble, water bowls, leashes, and presents into the back of the Bronco, I packed in nothing but an empty crate and my dogs, who were taking advance credit for the impending snow. How could I tell? By the white arctic glint in their warm brown eyes.
Just as I backed the Bronco out of the driveway and into Appleton Street, the first snowflakes began to fall. To avoid the worst of the early Christmas Eve traffic on 93, I intended to pick up Route 2 by Fresh Pond, but as I drove by the armory on Concord Avenue, I decided to make a short detour. I never meant to find Cliff Bourque and take him with me. He’d lost Mattie once. It would’ve been heartless to offer him the slight and probably false hope that she might still be alive. Even so, the impulse to tell him nagged at me. If I told Cliff Bourque everything? Regardless of Mattie’s fate, he might quit stalking his prey and get on to the kill. And if so? Well, Bourque might get caught. Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t care what happened to Lee Miner. I wouldn’t tell Cliff Bourque, then. I’d just take a few minutes to try to find out where he was. With luck, I’d discover him in a safe stupor beneath someone else’s dormant shrubbery.
I cruised past Steve’s clinic. Because of the holiday, the parking lot was empty except for Steve’s van. Cliff Bourque wasn’t crouched nearby, grenade in hand. I pulled the Bronco into a gas station, turned around, fought my way back into the traffic, and drove by again. This time, I scanned the wooded area opposite the clinic. In other words, I searched for Cliff Bourque in the place I’d first seen him. Stupid? I didn’t know where else to look. At any rate, if he’d been perched sniper-fashion high in the leafless branches of a Norway maple while he prepared to pick off Lee Miner, or even if he’d just been leaning against a tree trunk, I might not have spotted him. The traffic was even thicker and moving
even faster than it had been on the day Cliff Bourque dashed through it to save Kimi. I did my best to look for Cliff, though. I did. But I didn’t see him.
After that, I followed my original plan, but almost as soon as we crossed into Arlington, I regretted the decision to take Route 2. A sand truck had prematurely dressed the highway with a layer of salty dirt that every speeding little foreign compact tossed in the face of my big, muscular Bronco. Each sweep of the wipers gave me only a moment’s vision of the road and steadily ground the grit into the windshield. As the snow thickened, I cursed Ford for the absence of rear wipers and damned every car manufacturer on earth for failing to contrive some device to rid me of the mud on the side windows. I could hear and sense that there were cars on all sides, but except for an occasional blink at the road ahead, I couldn’t see them. Driving the Bronco northwest along Route 2, then northeast on 495, I felt like a kindly, sightless Newfoundland forced to run with a pack of Yorkshire terriers, destined to crush one.
Although I’d topped up the Bronco’s reservoir of window washer fluid before we left Cambridge, my steady pumping emptied it somewhere beyond Lowell. I was tempted to pull into the emergency lane and onto the verge of the highway to add fluid, but I was afraid of being clipped by a passing car. At the next exit, I pulled off 495 and stopped briefly in Tewksbury, where I got out to add wiper fluid and, while I was at it, to lock the hubs of the front wheels in case I hit an unplowed road and wanted to shift into four-wheel drive. As soon as I got back in, the snow that had accumulated on my hair during my two or three minutes in the storm began to melt in the good Ford heat. The car smelled of dogs and mud.
I got back on the highway, turned on the radio, and, over the noise of the defroster, listened to a couple of weather forecasts. Newcomers to this area typically pass through a stage of supposing that despite the presence of MIT and other local scientific institutions, Massachusetts has the world’s most incompetent meteorologists. We don’t, of course. What we have is unpredictable weather. Those of us who have been here a while treat weather forecasts the way an astrology skeptic treats horoscopes: When a prediction comes true, we’re astounded at the coincidence. Most of the time, though, a good, accurate weather report in eastern Massachusetts is one that limits itself to describing what it’s like out right now. According to the radio, the snow was coming down heavily, and we could expect between eight and twelve inches, possibly much more, unless, as could well happen, the snow turned to rain or the storm blew out to sea.
We made it to Haverhill, left 495, and turned north without running over any of the internal combustion Yorkies. Lights shining from the windows of the small stores and businesses along the road created the cheerful illusion of prosperity. In the parking lot of a plumbing supply place, dozens of unsold Christmas trees trucked down from Maine or New Brunswick rested under strings of multicolored lights against a maze of makeshift wooden supports. Sloppy letters slapped in white paint on a plywood sign advertised the trees at half price. I had a sense of time running out.
At the turn to Charity’s, I shifted into four-wheel drive and followed the tire tracks through the snow along the unplowed road. Three or four cars passed in the opposite direction, and I had to pull far to the right to let them get by. A bright flood at Charity’s back door showed the nearby outbuildings and lit up the dusting of white on the wreaths and bows. I left the Bronco at the side of the road. From one of the runs attached to the ex-garage, a golden dog yapped sharply at me, and my hope rose, but when I’d taken a few steps, I could see that the dog was a yellow Lab, and a male at that.
The barking of the Lab and the other dogs brought Charity to the door. The house was very hot and smelled of roasting lamb. The kitchen table and counters had been cleared of the stacks of artful little dog clothes. Charity was wearing a red wool dress. She’d brushed her hair and applied a thick layer of crimson lipstick.
“Holly Winter,” I reminded her. “I picked up Groucho. I’m a friend of Hope’s?”
“I’m, uh, expecting her,” she said, “but with the snow …”
“I can only stay a second,” I said. “I should’ve called. It’s about a dog?”
She looked relieved. “I’ve got to warn you,” she said. “I’m almost full up. There’s one run empty, but there’s no room in the house. I’ve got a cousin coming, and she doesn’t like dogs. She’s afraid of them really, but she won’t say so, and if you do, she gets offended, so I have to keep them all outside when she’s here. Did you want—?”
“No,” I said. “It’s about … When I was here before, you had a dog in one of those runs right near the back door? A kind of yellow-gold female, something like a shepherd, shorthaired.”
“Lady,” Charity said. “Really, she should’ve been in here with me, but there was no room, which was why I was so glad when he finally came and got her. I was starting to think he was never going to show up.”
“But he did?” God damn.
“You probably passed him on your way in.”
“Just now?”
She nodded.
“When he brought her in,” I said. “Was that, uh … This may sound kind of strange, but did it happen to be in the middle of the night?”
She laughed. “I guess you’d call it night if you don’t have a lot of dogs that want their breakfast. I’d just got up.” She paused and added happily, “I’m up at five.”
“A kind of pale-looking guy,” I said quickly. “Midtwenties maybe?”
“You know him?” she said.
“I’ve been trying to catch up with him,” I said. “Thanks. I’d better get going.”
Barrelling down the road, past the dark machine shops toward the main drag, I tried to remember the cars that had been leaving when I arrived, but I’d been concentrating so hard on getting the Bronco out of their way that I hadn’t really noticed them. It seemed to me that if they’d been big 4 × 4’s like mine, I wouldn’t have yielded the road so courteously. In fact, I had the vague impression that they’d all been small cars like Lee Miner’s. When I’d seen it in Steve’s parking lot, I’d thought that Jackie, not Lee, must have picked it out. That bright red was her color and Willie’s, too, not Lee’s. Oh, yeah. The make and model. Well, look. Can you tell a Belgian Malinois from a Tervuren? A malamute from a Siberian husky? A Keeshond from a Norwegian elkhound? Well, can you? At a glance? If you show dogs, they probably don’t even look alike to you, but if not? Well, I don’t show cars. I could, you know—my home town, Owls Head, Maine, happens to be the home of a famous museum of transportation—but I don’t. The Miners’ car was small and red, and it wasn’t something distinctive like a Jaguar, a Corvette, a Saab, a Mercedes, or an old Morgan. Even so, I thought that I just might recognize it.
And I did. Only a few miles after I’d swung onto 495, I spotted a small red car ahead of me in the right-hand lane. On the way to a dog show, almost anyone could be driving a small red car with a bumper sticker asserting that happiness is a Scottish terrier, but on 495 on Christmas Eve? When Miner had just left Charity’s? So that part was easy.
The traffic heading south was lighter than what we’d hit on the way north. The plows hadn’t been by for a while, but the Bronco was built more for snow than for grit, and I was finding the driving easier than I’d expected. I was feeling so elated, especially after I’d caught up with Miner, that instead of listening to the news, Christmas carols, or a talk show on the radio, I popped in a Hank Williams, Jr., tape and turned up the volume. Repeated fast-forwarding and reversing to play your favorite song over and over wrecks the whole tape, but I just had to hear Hank sing that sad, beautiful song, “Living Proof.”
Living proof.
23
I hate to find myself stuck behind a dawdler. It happens all the time in crowded obedience classes. You and your dog are striding along at a normal brisk pace, but the sluggish handler and lagging dog ahead slow you down to a dull creep. Don’t let them! Once your dog gets the idea that a normal pace is very slow, he’ll
get bored, and a bored dog is a lagging dog. Speed up and pass!
But I wasn’t training a dog. If I passed Miner, I’d simply lose sight of him. Even so, it irked me to poke along at a maximum speed of forty miles an hour, and when I’m behind the wheel, I don’t irk easily. I’m so used to Boston drivers that it startles me to see someone stop at a red light. If the car in front of me signals for a right turn, I expect an abrupt left. Miner’s driving, though, was not only slow, but, even judged against my Boston standards, really rotten. The small red car would speed up to forty, drop to twenty, then leap forward, and it moved erratically between the right-hand lane and the breakdown lane, sometimes straddling the two. Whatever the make of the small red car, it was no Bronco, and Miner probably lacked the confidence-boosting sound of Hank Williams, Jr., too, but I was not in a charitable mood. I wanted that dog, and I didn’t like waiting.
As we left Lawrence and entered Andover, the storm changed. Instead of blowing, the snow fell evenly and heavily. In case Miner hit a car invisible to him in the thick snow, I dropped back. The little red car slowed to a steady twenty and began to hug the shoulder, then suddenly veered left and barely missed a car abandoned in the breakdown lane with no warning lights or flares. In spite of the near miss, Miner immediately pulled right again, and my confidence vanished.
“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. “This son of a bitch is looking for a place to stop.”
What I’d mistaken for nervous driving made sense. He needed a place to pull off the highway for a few seconds—it wouldn’t take him long to open a door and shove Mattie out—but, first, he wanted to shake that Bronco that had been on his tail since Haverhill. When I’d dropped back, maybe he’d lost patience or lost sight of me and started to scan the highway in earnest. Or was he simply watching for the intersection with 93 South?